Monday, December 21, 2009

Here's something I'm blogging simply because, I like it. What is it? It's Mexican artist Ivan Puig's take on the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima:

And he has another similar photograph, this time a decimated battle-scene composed with chess pieces:

And . . . that's it. What a great idea, though. Artists! More of this kind type of thing, please. And not necessarily battle scenes either. Say, how about chess pieces posing in the Last Supper, for starters?

Saturday, December 19, 2009

A PLEASANT dream. Methought the smooth squareboardGrew rugged as the chequered field of life ; ^

My chessmen took a human shape and moved,The White with purpose good, the Black with ill.Behind the hosts in serried ranks arrayedThe Powers of Light and Darkness held their place ;And I, half-pleased, half-puzzled, watched the game.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

If you haven't finished your Christmas shopping by now I think it's a probably fair to assume that at this point you're rather desperate. There's so much chess product to choose from and little more than a week to go. What to get that special chesser in your life?

How about 100 of Raymondo's finest chess books? Not too pricey for the esteemed readership of this blog, I'm sure, but since we mentioned this collection as long ago as August they've probably already sold out don't you think? Perhaps the collected DVDs of Nigel Davies instead? A fine suggestion in many ways but I fear that even if the set does not break the bank the same is unlikely to be true of the floor of any room in which it is stored.

It's a tricky decision isn't it? Tricky, that is, until you discover the Knight Light.

Here's a fun and functional item for the chess or horse lover. It's a Knight Light! This clever lamp adds a comforting glow to any bedroom, den, or game room. Just plug the 18in.-tall lamp in to any standard outlet, turn on the cord switch and enjoy.

If the blurb and accompanying photographs haven't already got you reaching for your credit card then let me tell you that the Knight Light is "UL approved", whatever that means, and best of all the website flogging the thing makes clear it comes "Bulb included".

Monday, December 14, 2009

Well, did you get all excited about the London Chess Classic? Everyone I know in London who's visited hasn't been disappointed, but for those unable to make it Streatham & Brixton Chess Club President Angus French has kindly sent in these photographs showing what it's like to be there in the audience, starting with the playing hall itself. Enjoy!

And now the Press Conferences after. One day Carlsen explains how to beat Kramnik, a few days later, Kramnik explains his draw with Adams:

A few of the players look really quite grumpy, whilst of the smiles Luke McShane has the biggest - an accurate reflection of how they feel after five rounds? Round 6 is today, the final round tomorrow. If you've missed the game so far you can catch up with them via the official site; Magnus Carlsen leads and looks odds-on to go home grinning.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

The Chess in Art series, and subsequent Postscripts, have shown Chess-in-Artists roaming hither and yon in search of fresh insights. So it is a warming seasonal sensation, like the first Harvey Wallbanger on Christmas day (best taken before breakfast) to discover that many of them applied their palettes to the Yuletide. Not something that readily springs to mind as a Chess in Art sub-genre, for sure, but it will do nicely as a tasty stocking filler for mere players like ourselves.

As is the artists' privilege, they approach the matter sidelong in order to catch unawares the darker side of this shrilly trumpeted season of comfort and joy, comfort and joy, this season of comfort 'n joy. This should be no surprise, as with privilege comes duty. Thus it is the responsibility of the artist to reveal, lay bare, and provide for moral improvement, especially in rootless and troubled times.

Rootless and troubled times that have been with us since 1462, or thereabouts, when there was the first recorded incident of board rage:

None of us enjoys losing, but this is going a bit far. Thankfully FIDE seems to have succeeded in stamping it out, along with those new-fangled mobile phones.

By contrast, a few hundred years later, an Italian artist portrays the darker side of homely decorum and bliss.

Francesco Beda (1840-1900) The Chess Game

In his subtle composition Signor Beda shows that things are not as they appear on the serene surface, and that there are the tensions lurking behind the mask of domestic bonhommie, from which chess provides merciful relief.

The warm glow from the hearth raises the temperature in the melodrama coming to a boil after several days a-stewing in the emotional pressure cooker of typical family Christmas (though refreshingly free, as it is, from the trappings of rampant commercialism of our modern times). There's trouble a-brewing as the two fellows compete for the attentions of the fair lady. Let's hope that she manages to avert fisticuffs (poor lass, but 'tis the season for parrying winter duel).

Beyond, somewhat inappropriate fire-side canoodling leaves the coast clear for a posse of little darlings to squabble over their presents, and feed dolly to the dog. Wise old Father Christmas has legged it, and the chess players can hardly be blamed for making themselves scarce by the window. When the lid comes off they'll be hoping the mess doesn't dump on their board.

So, it you are spending time en famille this Christmas good advice would be to get out your set, find a nice quiet corner, and while they are roasting the turkey hope they don't cook your goose.

The game could also be a Godsend at another more contemporary, yet hallowed, Christmas institution: the office party, as witness this:

Tony Bradley (b 1965) The Chess Player

Analysing your adjourned positions on the office computer, in work-time, is asking for trouble, as we'd probably all agree. But at the annual Xmas bash, where one's colleagues do unlikely things that they regret for the rest of the year, a chess set could be a life-line. It might for example, provide a convenient pretext for a lady to rebuff the office Lothario, especially if he suggests slipping back to the deserted office to try his lap top (which, as double entendres go, is a trifle beside the compound innuendo dispensed by the late lamented Humphrey Lyttelton, a propos the lovely Samantha).

Here is another cautionary tale, warning of an elephant trap that snares many an unwary office party reveller: too much cheap plonk on an empty stomach.

Roland Barsik (b 1984) Time Out

It is the morning after the ill-advised excess of the night before, and day one of his year of remorse. There'll be no breakfast cocktail today. His head pounds, his colour drains, and our chess playing friend can't bear to open his eyes to set up the pieces. As the nausea rises before him, so does a nightmare recollection of his embarrassing deposit at the feet of his work mates. He is cracking up, and he is not laughing.

But enough of all this world-weary tongue-in-cheekery. Enjoy this whole-hearted feel-good design:

Dorit Levi (b 1952) Chess Players

In this exuberant confection of gorgeous curves the ample roly-poly minstrels, at one with their instruments, weave through and over the supporting grid. Their limbs dance across the frieze and make music as they go. We can almost hear their earthy carolling as it charms the birds from the trees; and the pieces dance along a jig. The image is laid out as a mosaic, and the rich blue, red and gold tessarae glow like baubles on a Christmas tree.

Chess-in-Artists may not have created their Chess-in-Art works deliberately with the festive season in mind, but this last one will serve very nicely as a Christmas card to all Chess in Art lovers.

Friday, December 11, 2009

I last won a chess tournament in 1993. I won two that year, one a grading-limited thirty minute tournament in Cowley and the other, a little earlier in the year, the national HASSRA championship in Bedford.

I never even won my class championship at school - Scholar's Mate did for me, would you believe - and it's not so easy to win your club championship when Harriet Hunt is a member. In fact, I believe the first of my 1993 triumphs constitutes the only normal-time-limit tournament I've ever won, and thus, to date - and quite likely, till the end of time - the last. I've won the occasional email tournament, but real, proper chess, cara a cara but with time to think - nothing. Not since 1993.

I'm not the strongest player in Huesca province, but three times in a row I've been the strongest player in its individual championship. This autumn, when the 2009 championship was played over nine consecutive weekends, I was the strongest player by a margin of 150 points: if I was ever to win it, it was surely to be this year.

The first round was as straightforward as can be - I won by default. I also won in the second round, a task complicated by the necessity to win inside three and a half hours in order to catch a night train across Spain to the small mining town where I was working the next morning. The target was achieved with about fifteen minutes to spare, the night train was caught...and so, the lack of sleep contributing, was a fever, which remained with me all week and into the next weekend. The third round, I played with a temperature, which shouldn't have prevented me winning for a third time.

Black played 22...h4 and expected to win (and go back to bed) shortly: he was then surprised by 23.Qg4! which not only stays in the game but actually wins a pawn. Black should have enough for it, but after 23...f5 24.Qxh4 he went badly wrong with 24...Nxd4? 25.Qxd4+ Rf6 and although White's 26.Qh4?! was far from best, Black lost his head trying to win instead of trying to hang on and fight another day. After 26...Rh8 27.Qb4 Qd7? 28.Rad1 Rxh3? 29.Qxb7 Rxh2? 30.Rxd5 it was all over, as was Black's weekend. He went back to bed with more than one kind of headache.

In the diagram position, Black has a simple win.

You would still more than likely win a nine-round Swiss if you got to eight points (not to mention eight and a half, a point that Black might have liked to have kept in mind during the crisis of the previous game). But winning six straight games under pressure is not so simple even with a very large rating advantage - albeit substantially simpler than without it - and although the fourth round was a straightforward win, I was incredibly lucky to get the required point in the fifth round, in which Black missed rather more wins than the one that White missed early on.

Incredibly lucky - or perhaps not so, since if you use up enough luck in one single game, you're not really entitled to any more. In round six I played a young Huesca player, Pablo Bellosta, who I'd beaten relatively easily with the White pieces in the Aragón championships in August, having a large and stable advantage out of an opening I'd known better than he. Pablo had done some work since then, and although we were, nevertheless, soon in territory newer to him than me, it was a much more two-sided game than our previous.

I had rather fancied this position and after 18...Bxe4 I passed up 19.dxc5 which didn't (and doesn't) look like anything for White after 19....Nxc5 20.Bxe4 Nxe4 (or 20....Qc7) 21.Qxe4 Qb7 and punted 19.Qxe4 instead, trusting on the queen's access to the eighth rank and the line-opening a4 to provide an attack. Alas, it was nonsense, and after 19...cxd4 20.a4 Nxf6 21.a5 Qc7 22.Qa8+ Kd7! (the idea I had missed, although White has nothing after 22...Qb8 either) there were no open lines and no attack. White was entirely lost. One error, but enough to lose the game without a struggle.

Four out of six: and you surely won't win a nine-round Swiss with seven. Well, not from 4/6, anyway. I played grinding-chess in the last three rounds, won them all and finished on seven, my last game being the last game to finish. The eighth-round leader, who had had five points from six rounds and had won the next two, nervously watched my game, calculating possible tie-break results, having lost his last game when a draw would have won him the title. The second-placed player (my third round opponent) had lost as well and as it transpired, when I reached seven points out of nine, there were four of us on the same score.

Here they have a system, one I quite like, where there are two possible tie-breaks and there is a draw at the end of the tournament to see which one should apply. The draw took place - my assumption being that my tie-break was far too bad for me to have any chance - and the computer calculated the outcome.

It took a few seconds and then it came up....

...showing that I had tied for first, on the selected tie-break. So the other system was applied, to break the continuing tie - and placed me second. Subcampeón, as they say here, but as far as I was concerned, a million miles from campeón. A million miles, or sixteen years.

Sixteen years is a long time. Will I have to wait another sixteen until I win again? I was still only twenty-seven when I won that title. I am forty-four now. In another sixteen years, I shall be sixty.

I have the scores of the games I played in 1993, although none of them are really worth seeing. But I keep them anyway, for old times' sake. Preserve your memories. They're all that's left to you.

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Three-part series presented by historian Benjamin Woolley about popular games in Britain from the Iron Age to the Information Age, in which he unravels how an apparently trivial pursuit is a rich and entertaining source of cultural and social history.

In part one, Woolley investigates how the instinct to play games is both as universal and elemental as language itself and takes us from 1st-century Britain to the Victorian era.

The chess bit starts at around 50:05 and feel free to zip straight there if you feel that our game doesn't really deserve to be placed in the same category as Snakes and Ladders,Ludo and Nine Mens Morris - although if you do you'll miss some interesting stories, particularly regarding the origin of the former.

Anyhoo, the chess bit: after an unpromising start where the board is set up thus,

it's only chess as my friend and fellow blogger EJH would say

you'll find five minutes of Jonathan Rowson talking about the Staunton chess pieces, the London tournament of 1851, Anderssen - Kieseritsky, Fischer - Spassky, chess as cold war (or is it cold war as chess?) and the nature of chess intelligence. Bullet chess interviewing!

Monday, December 07, 2009

Excited about the London Chess Classic? About Carlsen going for the +6 he needs to break even rating-wise, or whatever it is? Kasparov on the phone after each round? About a resurgent Short testing himself at the highest level again? About what David Howell might pull out of the hat? About Kramnik's repertoire - doesn't he even venture the odd 1.e4 against sub-2700s? And isn't Michael Adams one of those non-Super GMs now? Not to mention the side tournaments that range from blitzes to FIDE Opens? And, oh yeah, the Kortchnoi simul?

Well, if you're not excited now, you probably never will be, since the whole shebang starts tomorrow. Or maybe this will get you in the mood last-minute:

What a punchy poster! And is it me, or does it more than vaguely resemble boxing adverts?

Why not? The Fight To Put Zaïre On The Map; The Fight To Bring Top Class Chess to Britain. That's the kind of thing we need. And hopefully the organizers will have learnt a few other tricks from boxing too. How about bikini-clad beauties displaying the number of each round as it begins, eliciting improbable grins from the blood-splattered faces in the front row?

But what I'm really hoping for is a manic announcer hyping up the crowd as each contestant enters the ring stage, replete with wacky personal characterisations of the combatants. Google boxing nicknames, and you'll find they range from the banal - "Iron" Mike Tyson, "Big" George Foreman - to the brilliant: Andrew "Six Heads" Lewis, Juan "The Hispanic Causing Panic" Lazcano, "The Count of Monte Fisto".

Which leads me, rather late in the post, to a question. What nicknames would you like to hear introduce the players tomorrow, as they strut onto the London stage for the first time? How about: Vladimir Kasparov Vanquisher Kramnik? Magnus Mega Champ Carlsen? Nigel Nine Sacs Short?

Saturday, December 05, 2009

ejh's Chess in Art series finished about a year ago. It treated us to a generous selection of chess art, but inevitably somethings weren't included – Still Life for example.

And thank goodness for that would be a typical reaction. Still Life? Call a spade a spade as our Gallic friends do: nature mortes. Dead. Off the twig. Gone to join the choir invisible. The Académie Française consigned it to the fourth division of subject matter. Quite right, too. Dead nature and dead boring.

Willem Kalf 1622-1693

Still-Life with Chinese Porcelain Bowl 1662

Here's a case in point in which the picture expires before our very eyes. A few highlights peer from the gloom: a carelessly tilted crock; a raunched tapestry; and a half-peeled fruit shuffling off its mortal coil, destined for recycling.

Here's another one, but with some chess this time.

Luis Jacabo Alvarez Rodriguez

Jaque Mate (date unknown)

More modern perhaps (the filter tips are a giveaway), and more to look at, but that doesn't make it more successful. The objects plod around the canvas without a skip in their step, and the eye tags along behind without a focal point to stop and stare. And another thing: couldn't those ciggies (and the case itself come to that) set up a counterpoint diagonal in the other direction? Couldn’t the artist have risked more than a miserly two overlaps? Don’t you just crave another drink - something, anything, to bridge that gap in the centre?

But maybe that is all beside the point. The artist isn't doing a still life, but a whodunnit. Look at those his-and-her glasses, one full, the other empty; the fag-ends (tipped for her, un-tipped for him) smoked drag for drag; the discarded piece doubling as a blood spurt under the barrel of what could be a lady’s weapon. The game is up. This is chess as a duel to the death. Check mate on the board and dead mate on the floor, and that's stone dead, not restin'.

Compositionally this is a bit more exciting:

Lubin Baugin 1610-1663

Still Life with Chess Board 1630

The elements are clustered, asymmetrical, untidy, overlapping, and positioned on either side of the demarcation line raked through the picture. The chromatic action is on the table with a collection of meaning-laden bric-à-brac, while on the cabinet the black and white chess board calibrates the colours and tones. There is a treat in the rendering of the varied surfaces: reflective, granular, patinated, polished, satin, even transparent.

The bits and pieces to the left represent the five senses (as the picture's subtitle has it, according to some sources), whereas the chess board, at a guess, stands for the higher intellect savouring and refining what is available. It presents itself as a cartographic scale that measures and assesses true values. The board and platter are joined only by carnations, emblems of carnal pleasure and its inevitable decay, and together they make a commentary from beyond the divide. The message is that mortal flesh and its capacities are short-lived: so ponder while you may what you'll leave behind when you go (and there'll be no chess on the other side).

And this maybe is another take on the five senses theme, from modern times again:

Valentin Chasov

Still Life with Chess Board 2000

It is a carefully centred arrangement with warm points of colour in orbit in a luminous space. Once again a board is the chess motif of choice, and it multitasks: its rigid linearity is a foil for the softer surfaces and curves in the design, and makes a call that other right-angles echo; its darks and lights (modulated by a cast shadow) define the tonal range; and its narrative function is to evoke the absent friend represented only by stolen images – the photograph and bas-relief. This is a shrine, with mementos of someone recently departed arranged as on an alter. A significant other perhaps; but they'll play chess together no more.

An obsession with borrowed time seems to be the cheery lot of the still life artist. Here today and gone tomorrow is the message: life stilled.

Daniel Solnon

L'Echiquier (unknown date)

Here a black knight/dark night pun suggests familiar territory, but maybe this one is on a different tack. It is not about the nature of being (life, experience, relationships - that sort of thing), but the nature of Being (what's it all about; what underlies reality - what sort of thing are things, sort of thing). The artist is on a tack alright, brass tacks, he wants to get down and metaphysical.

First off there are the alabaster solids: the one on the left has a pentagram (5 sided) base, there's a pyramid (4-sided) in the middle, both of which have, allegedly, harmonious properties, and the bit missing from the cube on the right would be, yes, a 3-sided form. Next up, behind the knight is what looks like an effort at a construction diagram for a golden section and indeed that is where the piece sits within the rectangle of the picture frame. Then the disposition of the books (the top one exactly as deep as the three upon which it rests) isn't accidental, they have a happy congruence with the vertical halfway line of the picture, which divides the ten (no mistake) squares of the board into two lots of five, numbers that crop up in the formula for the golden mean, where 1.61803...is given by the square root of 5, plus one, all divided by 2.

Solnon is alluding, it seems, to the hidden order beneath the surface chaos, to the principles governing the contingent; and in the here and now, the inherent not the hereafter.

Perhaps there is more to nature mortes than meets the eye, and we should give it the time of day. Not dead, Major, just restin'. And to prove the point have a look at this little display of discreet good taste, the fruits of privilege, set like pearls on velvet.

Friday, December 04, 2009

Or so said my friend and fellow blogger EJH a couple of Fridays ago, although not that out as it transpired. In the week that followed I visited both branches of Chess and Bridge only to find that they were yet to receive any supplies from the publisher. Fortunately when I went back to Baker Street this Tuesday I finally got my mitts on a copy. I had a good read, enjoyed it immensely, then got on with my life.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that we had been sent an open letter from Ida Eddis Foster concerning that self-same 40th edition of Kingpin. "Dear Chess World" Eddis Foster begins, displaying a touching, if deeply erroneous, faith in the proportion of the planet's chessers who are wont to drop by our humble blog. S/he continues ... well, why don't I just show you the letter (with the disclaimer that the views expressed below are Mr./Ms. Eddis Foster's and not necessarily our own):-

Dear Chess World,

Shocked is scarcely the word for my reaction to issue 40 of Kingpin magazine. Reading the detailed article about Ray Keene, "Machiavelli on Ice", anyone would conclude that such a man merits no place at all in the chess world.

It was bad enough when the previous issue uncharitably put Ray's writing under the spotlight for 15 pages, together with some dark hints about his financial dealings. There should be a law against such things.

And now 13 more pages about what supposedly happened to investors' millions, and another unseemly charge of plagiarism, as if anybody cared. The heading contains a word not even in my dictionary, "Grandfraudster", and I regard this shambles with total disgust. Nobody's interested in such exposés, however much "documentary evidence" Kingpin finds to put on its website http://www.kingpinchess.net/category/penguin-files/.

Enough is enough, and ideally Kingpin should be banned (or burned - or both). Failing that, I urge Ray's supporters, as well as all right-thinking chess-lovers, to:

1) Tell the Editor of Kingpin what he can do with copies of his magazine. The address is: kingpinchess@yahoo.com.

2) Write to the Editors of The Times and The Spectator, expressing dismay at the precise accusations against their chess correspondent and telling them they look ridiculous.

3) Send congratulatory messages to the British Chess Magazine and CHESS for steadfastly defending Ray's interests, by omission and/or commission.

4) Persuade leading officials of the English Chess Federation to make Ray the Finance Director, with unfettered powers.

5) Swamp chessgames.com with messages summarizing the attacks on him, so that Ray can respond at a safe site where, mercifully, there are still people who look up to him.

Please act now because Ray really needs help.

Yours truly,

Ida Eddis FosterNewtownRochester

2 December 2009

We thank Mr./Ms. Eddis Foster for his/her letter and take the liberty of providing some links that may prove useful to our readers.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

If you turn up at the first, let’s say it’s at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, you’ll find the playing hall to be a slightly cramped, not spectacularly well lit room while the demo boards are small, as far away from the spectators as they could possibly be and not always kept up to date. There is no Grandmaster commentary but if you were to wander into the bar area there may or may not be a computer screen displaying what may or may not be a game you’re interested in and you may or may not overhear a visiting GM, Spess, Conquest, Jon Levitt for example, giving an opinion on the state of play*.

- but it’s free to get in.

If you were to go to the second, for the sake of argument we’ll hold it at Kensington Olympia, you’ll discover “… excellent facilities including a 400 seat soundproof auditorium, two commentary rooms and multimedia presentation.” Rumour has it that there will even be, “… separate commentary for beginners and improvers…. ” and furthermore, visitors “… will be able to play tournament or informal games all day.”**

- but admission will cost you £15 a day.

Alas, you only have time to visit one. If we assume your journey time would be the same for each tournament, which one are you going to go to?

BORP VIIaThe tournament at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand has a habit of opening each round by announcing that it is the strongest chess tournament held in England since the 1930s. The one at Olympia has a stronger field than its cousin yet merely claims it is “… the highest level tournament in London for 25 years ….”**

Which one for choice here?

PS: The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that Blue or Red Pill? now has an Index

*according to my own experience when I’ve visited over the past couple of years